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CSMX - Post #12

Tuesday was patch day. I won't call this a quiet patch. The icon changes alone have spawned a swirling mass of upset players. There are color blind optimization problems. There were skin problems. There was some Tidi stuff going on in the new wormholes. We've also had a lot of discussion about the notifications being given when then entosis is used. A lot of discussion. Chat has been very active this week over all of this. I have no idea where any of it is going to go. I wish I did, but I don't so I won't lie and make up platitudes. The complaints have been hard and brought up.

While not a large paragraph, that has been the bulk of the CSM week. There was the weekend meeting which I missed because, work day. I'm waiting for the recording.

On Monday, CCP Fozzie released a dev blog about a further delay to the July sov release. The delay is scheduled to be a week. The hope is that it won't become a larger delay but there is no promise of that. Delays are not what anyone wants to hear but the CSM has asked that any delay related to the sov releases come out as soon as possible. Further and more detailed messaging can wait. The goal is to communicate to the thousands of players who are waiting that a delay has happened.

I'd love to have a lot to discuss this week but I don't. The week has been a rough one for me. I debated trying to make the post longer with fluff but I decided not to. Thankfully, I'm on the mend. I've started responding back through my backlog of eve-mail from the last week so fear not if you have not heard from me.

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I think that the new icon system fails to convey vital information as well as the old one; the purpose of the Overview icon is to allow me to automatically and instantly categorise what type of object I am looking at, without having to read the Type column.

It is vital to automatically interpret whether I'm looking at a player ship, rat, wreck, drone, deployable, structure or celestial. It is merely useful to be able to tell apart the different sub-types of object visually (i.e. different sizes of ships and drones, or types of deployables). Being able to distinguish a player flying a frigate from a destroyer is not actually very useful in PVP because I need to identify precisely which hull they are flying from the Type column.

Lack of familiarity is an issue at the moment but my fear is that the problem is more fundamental than that; the new icons are all quite similar to each other. Rats and players are identical bar their colour, which is only obvious when they're red. Ships, wrecks and drones are fairly similar at first glance when they should ideally look irreconcilably different. The new icons were designed with a unified artistic vision but this is a hindrance to functionality because of this artistic overlap.

I think I understand that CCP is trying to bring the look of their game into the second decade in order to continue to appeal to new players as a current game, rather than a relic of the past. I like the idea of new Overview icons and I like a lot of the icons themselves but the end result is confusing and sacrifices usability in order to look pretty. It reminds me too much of the new map.

Barring complaints about scaling and usability for people with less-than-perfect vision, I do think that the issue is being blown out of proporation just a little bit.

What’s useful upfront information and what's bewilderingly unnecessary detail depends on what you're doing. I see no use in distinguishing between small, medium and large Ice Asteroids but ice miners probably find it rather nice. It's not like we're all required to memorize all the icons. It’s always been the case that there were distinctions I was concerned about and then a bunch of other stuff that was, to me, just stuff. Accordingly, for me the distinction between frigate and destroyer is sorta nice while the distinction between asteroid size is inconsequential. With that in mind, I haven’t had to relearn all that much since I haven’t bothered committing my inconsequentials to memory. Others may balk at my lack of thoroughness.

The net result for me is the rather small comment that currently it’s a little difficult to discern the difference between neutral NPCs and neutral Players as the slightly filled in icon doesn’t show up all that well. Increase that contrast just a bit (via color perhaps or maybe even more solidity) and I’ll be pleased as punch.

My team found the bew icons a lot easier to deal with if we added a background color to neutrals/no standing/poor standing/terrible standing people as that pukled all ships out from the "clutter." However therevreally is not a great color to use. We already have strong meanings mentally associated with blue, green, purple, yellow and red. That left the very light grey which makes reading text difficult or the blue-green darkish one which is close to existing associations. Could you please ask them to add a few more options? A mid grey and a couple of browns and tans would help a lot.

I think the icons are ugly and not well done. I will learn them but I will never think that they are well designed. There are too many of them turning meaningful differentation into unnecessary complication.

I have been reading through some of the whining about the icon changes... and I really don't get it. This is a learning curve issue, the icons simply ARE more informative than the old one... it's just the vets whining about changes they don't see a need for as they are vested in and comfortable with the old ways...

and HC has the right of it... "...most of the complaints are really based around dislike of change and lots and lots not knowing about the change."

This harks to an, unpublished it seems, comment I made on Talvrian Dex's last post... about how the vast majority of EVE players don't read blogs or MMO 'zines or follow the CSM or, well, keep up with anything in the metagame... for many, if not most, changes like these land on em out of the blue as they see it. They are playing a game for fun and relaxation... and they don't put more effoty into it than that.

"During my ship testing I had time to get accustomed to the new icons. They can be a little hard to distinguish at the high resolution of my monitors, but the approach certainly provides a lot of extra information and I expect I will get used to them with time. I am not sure why some players are crying about the sky falling in on them."

What is important is this new approach provides a lot of extra information and all of us will get used to them with time. You wanna know if the icon changes are positive? Ask a noob... evidently all yer gonna get from vets is entitled whining.

Its not that at all for me. It is simply tgat the old crosses jumped out at you, while the new ship icons blend in. Maybe the new ship icons could be a brighter white than thecrest of the icons or in a "bold print."

Yes the old icons jumper out at you... they were few and so had no need to be discernible from each other bu much... the new icons are drawn with thinner lines because the shapes are now important, not just the size of the icon. I myself have used the color and flashing tags extensively to help me understand the chaos that is group PvP... and I feel the new shapes plus color and tags with be a vast improvement.

Hell even with color and tags I never ever knew in detail what was what from the icons, I only knew flashing red, red and yellow were enemies, that's it... I had find and select targets by looking at the overview which in fighter speak is flying headdown... IE your eyes are not on the enemy, but on a screen inside your cockpit...

And yeah sometimes the primary was not 'this guy' or 'that guy' but "Kill all drones." or "Kill all frigates."... and the old style icons simply did not work for me there... I would have to switch my OV to the Drones tab or reorder my OV by Hulltype and scroll to the frigates... all wasted time, and in PvP time is the single most precious and least available commodity in EVE, I am very hopeful this will improve for me now.

Anon 6:34, yours was so far the best an least whiney negative response I have seen... I was speaking in general terms, not specific... and I hope you knew that.

I think you can agree that there is a lot of very entitled butthurt vet whining going on with this change, you IMHO are not one of them... and have you by any chance seen what noobs are saying about the new icons? So I still disagree with your analysis... and I feel time will prove me right... well, it will definitely prove one of us right.

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